Roughly half a billion transactions with significant, but preventable, fraud potential occur in the United States each year. Purchasing card contact events that can lead to fraudulent occurrences include application processing, card activation, usage, such as mail and phone ordering, and maintenance events, such as address or other information changes. It is estimated that the total cost of fraud is $1.3 million for every one million gross active accounts, or $1.34 in fraud loss per gross active account (Sources: VISA/MC, Credit Card Prevention Sourcebook).
A large portion of this fraud could effectively be addressed though improved identification of known fraudulent names, fraudulent addresses, fraudulent phone numbers, fraudulent social security numbers, and other fraudulent personal information. In fact, a large number of fraud cases are typically perpetrated by repeat offenders or organized rings.
Current tools to combat repeat and organized fraud are still underdeveloped. While there are a myriad of sources for fraud-related information, the various sources focus on differing pieces of personal data and return fraudulent alerts in non-standard formats. In addition to the lack of uniformity of the alert information, current systems lack real time, “near” real time, or via batch functionality. Furthermore, no single comprehensive source exists that is capable of addressing fraud during the many stages of a purchasing card account.